3 Top Stories Affecting Dow Healthcare Stocks This Week

The Swiss food major Nestle will divest the assets of Pfizer’s baby food unit in Mexico, a business it purchased globally in an $11.85 billion transaction in 2012, reported Mexico’s competition watchdog to Reuters. Mexico’s Federal Competition Commission, which in November turned down the merger as it would give Nestle excessive power in the baby food market, said that it must also license the Pfizer brands for 10 years to the company that buys the assets. Beyond that, Nestle will not be permitted to operate Pfizer’s baby food brands for 20 years, but it can keep the license for Pfizer’s Maternal products, which include multivitamins for women and which do not compete with any Nestle business.

In 2012, Ian Read was the highest-paid chief executive at a large pharmaceutical firm, as top officers in the United States remained on average much better compensated than their European counterparts. Pfizer hiked Read’s remuneration by 2.5 percent to $25.6 million last year, while Novo Nordisk’s Lars Rebien Soerensen had the distinction of being the lowest-paid chief executive, with $5 million, according to the analyst Sam Fazeli, for Bloomberg Industries in a note on Thursday, which also said that the median pay of CEOs of large pharmaceutical firms in the U.S. was $17.2 million in 2012, 85 percent higher than the $9.3 million European average.

On Thursday, J&J reported the divestiture to Elan Corporation of roughly 82 million American Depositary Shares of Elan held by Janssen Pharmaceutical, which is an affiliate of Johnson & Johnson. This sale was conducted in accordance with the “Dutch Auction” tender offer begun by Elan on March 11. The aggregate proceeds should be received on or before April 30. Janssen will receive $11.25 per ADS, which will accumulate in an after-tax gain of around $213 million, and will be posted by Johnson & Johnson in the second quarter.